Since 2000, Your Real Rate Of Return From Stocks Has Been Just 0.67% Annually

The inflation-adjusted rate of return from the S&P500 with dividends fully re-invested from September 2000 to September 2013 has been just 0.67% annually.

Check for yourself, here.

First New Bank Start-Up Since 2010 Caters To Pennsylvania Amish

The Wall Street Journal Reports here:

The number of federally insured institutions nationwide shrank to 6,891 in the third quarter after this summer falling below 7,000 for the first time since federal regulators began keeping track in 1934, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

The decline in bank numbers, from a peak of more than 18,000, has come almost entirely in the form of exits by banks with less than $100 million in assets, with the bulk occurring between 1984 and 2011. More than 10,000 banks left the industry during that period as a result of mergers, consolidations or failures, FDIC data show. About 17% of the banks collapsed. ...

Unlike before the financial crisis, new startup banks aren't rushing to take the place of exiting institutions. Every year from 1934 to 2009, investors in the U.S. chartered at least a few and sometimes hundreds of new banks, according to the FDIC data. The Bank of Bird-in-Hand opened in Bird-in-Hand, Penn., on Monday—it was the first new bank startup in the U.S. since December 2010. ...

While the new bank will offer online deposits and target local customers who aren't Amish, it will also operate a courier service to accommodate customers who might not be able to drive up or log on—a nod to the fact many Amish don't use cars or computers. The drive-through window of the bank's one branch accommodates a horse and buggy, and there is a shelter in the parking lot to shield horses from rain.

NY Times Photographer Likens Obama Image Management To Communist Propaganda From Soviet State News Agency TASS

Yeah, well, here's why!

And you thought the extremists were in the Tea Party.

Reported here:

Barack Obama's White House has been accused of producing Soviet-style propaganda by press photographers who are furious at being denied access to the US president. Mr Obama's aides routinely block independent photographers from capturing him at work, before distributing flattering pictures shot by Pete Souza, his official photographer. During a tense meeting at the White House, the practice was described by Doug Mills, a veteran photographer for The New York Times, as “just like TASS,” the Soviet Union state news agency.

Once Again, ObamaCare Is Simply The HMO-ization Of Healthcare All Over Again

And given the choice, people overwhelmingly pick Preferred Provider Organizations (PPOs) over Health Maintenance Organizations.

But under ObamaCare, you have no choice.

Flashback to Scott Gottlieb, here, in September:

Obamacare's exchange based plans will be a throwback to the 1990s style of restrictive HMOs. They will give you fewer choices of doctors and hospitals than the kinds of health plans currently sold in the private, commercial marketplace. The doctor networks that Obamacare plans use will resemble Medicaid plans.

Now comes this from The Wall Street Journal, here:

Nearly half of the ObamaCare plans are tightly managed HMOs, according to a McKinsey & Co. analysis. In states like California, Missouri and New Hampshire, many networks are 40% or 45% the size of those offered for normal commercial coverage. Patients face the prospect of waiting months and driving miles to clinics and county hospitals.

Narrow networks can be a useful cost-control tool, to the extent people choose to give up medical options in return for lower premiums. But that's rarely what people want when they're choosing with their own money. Some 82.5% of eHealth customers in 2012 purchased preferred provider organization plans (PPOs) that are structured so patients can visit virtually any physician.

The awful irony of this new ObamaCare health system is that all adults now enjoy mandated pediatric vision benefits, even if they don't have kids, but parents can't take their daughter to an expensive children's hospital if she gets really sick. Everybody gets "free" preventive checkups with no copays, but not treatment for a complex illness from specialists at an academic medical center.

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ObamaCare must be scrapped.

The Dallas Federal Reserve Bank Draws A Graph Showing How Much Obama Sucks

Red is where we are. Green is where we should be.

Obama is the worst president since he's been born.

h/t James Pethokoukis

Rush Limbaugh Thinks The Pope Is Totally Wrong, Biting The Hand That Makes The Church Rich

Here:

[T]his pope makes it very clear he doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to capitalism and socialism and so forth. ...

If it weren't for capitalism, I don't know where the Catholic Church would be. ... I have been numerous times to the Vatican.  It wouldn't exist without tons of money. ...

This is just pure Marxism coming out of the mouth of the pope.  Unfettered capitalism?  That doesn't exist anywhere.  Unfettered capitalism is a liberal socialist phrase to describe the United States. ... 

[R]eading what the pope's written about this is really befuddling because he's totally wrong -- I mean, dramatically, embarrassingly, puzzlingly wrong. ...

The Catholic Church, the American Catholic Church has an annual budget of $170 billion.  I think that's more than General Electric earns every year.  And the Catholic Church of America is the largest landholder in Manhattan.  I mean, they have a lot of money.  They raise a lot of money.  They wouldn't be able to reach out the way they do without a lot of money.

Larry Kudlow Says Pope Francis' Anti-Capitalism Is Wrong

Just now on his radio program at wabcradio.com, calling socialism and communism "godless".

Way to go, Larry.

The Moneybags Behind The American Conservative Comes Out For Higher Minimum Wage In California!

Proving once again that the word conservative often has little to do with free markets, the moneybags behind The American Conservative until March of this year has seen Governor Jerry Brown's California minimum wage of $10 and raised him $2!

The New York Times reports here:

The Massachusetts State Senate approved a measure last week that would increase that state’s minimum wage to $11 an hour, far more than the $7.25-an-hour federal minimum. Hoping to reduce low-wage workers’ dependence on government aid, a conservative billionaire in California, Ronald Unz, is backing a referendum to raise his state’s minimum wage to $12 — even more than the $10 minimum that Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law in September. And on Tuesday, officials in Washington State announced that voters in SeaTac, a Seattle suburb, had approved a referendum to establish a $15-an-hour minimum wage for the 6,500 workers at the international airport there. Also this week in Maryland, the Montgomery and Prince George’s county councils voted to raise the minimum to $11.50 an hour by 2017.

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Moonbeams everywhere.

Dear President Obama

You're At Risk On Healthcare.gov, ObamaCare Website Should Be Scrapped, Say Hacker Experts

"When you develop a website, you develop it with security in mind. And it doesn't appear to have happened this time. It's really hard to go back and fix the security around it because security wasn't built into it. We're talking multiple months to over a year to at least address some of the critical-to-high exposures on the website itself ... everything from hacking someone's computer so when you visit the website it actually tries to hack your computer back, all the way to being able to extract email addresses, users names--first name, last name--locations. When you look at the site itself, it could be really good. It could do really well. They're just not building the security into the site itself. Putting your information on there is definitely a risk."

-- David Kennedy, chief executive of TrustedSec

"There's not a plan to fix this that meets the sniff test of being reasonable."

-- Morgan Wright, CEO of Crowd Sourced Investigations

For the full story, go here.

Crony Socialism: Fed Profits On College Student Loans Rank Third Behind Exxon-Mobil And Apple!

Or is that socialist cronyism?

Anyway, those thirsty blood suckers in the federal government made $41.3 billion off the nation's college student loan program in fiscal 2013, according to the Detroit Free Press, here:

It’s a higher profit level than all but two companies in the world: Exxon Mobil cleared $44.9 billion in 2012, and Apple cleared $41.7 billion.

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That's not quite right, however.

In 2012 the profits thrown off from massive numbers of government bonds and mortgage backed securities "purchased" by the Federal Reserve and returned to the Treasury by the Fed were more than double that, as reported here last January:

The Federal Reserve sent a record $88.9 billion in profits to the Treasury Department in 2012 as it reaped gains from the unconventional programs it launched to spur economic growth.

Last year's remittance to Treasury topped the previous record of $79.3 billion in 2010, Fed records show.

Democrat Leader In Senate Makes Unprecedented Change To Centuries-Old Filibuster Rule

Senate majority leader Democrat Harry Reid has just thrown out the rule book for filibusters in the Senate.

Story here:

By a vote of 52-48, the Senate invoked the so-called “nuclear option” to change the historic filibuster rules of the upper chamber. As a result, the minority party will be prevented from filibustering any nominations other than those to the Supreme Court.

"It's time to change the Senate before the institution becomes obsolete,” Majority Leader Harry Reid said Thursday morning on the Senate floor ahead of the unprecedented alteration to centuries-old rules regarding the power of the minority party to contest Senate business.

“The need for change is so, so very obvious,” he said. “It’s manifest [that] we have to do something to change things.”

... lawmakers lamented that if the party in power can change the rules, then rules are meaningless. 

Obama Approval Tanks With ObamaCare

Poll here.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this website!

Representative Lamar Smith (TX-21), here:

"Given the distressing testimony we heard at the Science Committee’s hearing about Healthcare.gov, there is only one reasonable course of action. Mr. President, take down this website."

Ritholtz doing The Mussolini

5 Million Get Insurance Canceled, Obama Claims Over 100 Million Sign-Ups In First Month!

The red diaper doper baby in chief strikes again, in a conference call to supporters, quoted here:

Boasting of his administration's skill in encouraging taxpayers to buy health insurance policies through public marketplaces, he claimed that 'in the first month alone, we've seen more than 100 million Americans already successfully enroll in the new insurance plans.' ...

It's likely Obama meant to initially take credit for 100,000 success stories, rather than 100 million. But his mangling of the statistics put him off-track by a factor of 1,000.

And even the smaller number relies on a flexible definition of what counts, and what doesn't, as an Obamacare subscriber.

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Off by a factor of 1,000, which pretty much sums up everything about the last 5 years.

This is what you get when you put the son of Cheech and Chong in charge of the country. You know, intercontinental railroads, military corpse-men and three proud words ("made in the USA"). 

Justin Amash Isn't A Conservative, Just An Ambitious Climber

People keep calling Rep. Justin Amash, Republican (MI-3), a conservative, but he isn't. What he mostly is is ambitious, like most politicians, despite what his own campaign website continues to say.

Conservatism is a tool in the hands of this tool peddler's son, which he has used to advance his career in elections but has set aside when it comes to votes on say abortion, energy and the budget where he has made the good the enemy of the perfect. This is surprising from someone who claims to be a moderate.

By his own admission to George Will last April, when the prospect of throwing his hat in the ring to vie for the seat of retiring Democrat Senator Carl Levin was still tantalizingly real, Justin Amash demonstrated that his conservatism is merely part of his calculated "mix of positions", not the center of who he is:

“Tell me how a Democrat is going to attack me on the social issues.” Republicans, however, might take up that task. Nevertheless, he thinks that he could win a Republican primary and that “my mix of positions is best for winning the general.”

“Because I do not fit neatly in the Republican box, some establishment Republicans and pundits think I am extreme,” but “I am a moderate” because “the point of the Constitution is to moderate the government.”

Republicans take note.

Justin Amash doesn't moderate his positions for the sake of Republican votes, but for the sake of Democrat ones. But God help you if your positions as a Republican don't toe his libertarian line, then he won't budge an inch.

A clearer picture of the practical meaning of libertarianism you will hardly find: They are Democrats in disguise.

"The only way ObamaCare pain stops for Democrats is if they repeal it."

So says John McIntyre of Real Clear Politics, just now on the Larry Kudlow Radio Show.

The NY Sun Reminds Yellen Congress Regulates The Value Of Money, Not The Fed

The wimps in the Senate are rolled yet again, but The Sun shineth, here:

What needs to be confronted is the scandal of Federal Reserve independence. Where in the Constitution does it say that monetary policy is supposed — or permitted — to be independent of politics? If the Founders of America had wanted the monetary power to be given to a body independent of politics, they could have given it to the Army or the Navy or the Supreme Court. But they sat down in Philadelphia and gave the power to “coin money and regulate the value thereof and of foreign coin” to, in the Congress, the single most political institution in the entire constitutional system.

Vanguard's VTSMX Posts Record High Of 45.46 Yesterday, The 44th New High In 2013

This fund, Vanguard's Total Stock Market Index, has posted new all time highs in every month this year save June: one in January, six in February, six in March, three in April, NINE in May, six in July, two in August, two in September and six in October. They really bought in May and went away, but only for a month.

Yesterday's new high is the third in November.

Students of  log-periodic bubbles as described by Didier Sornette are paying close attention.